‘The Dead’ lives Not known for their subtlety, complexity or quietude, musicals are normally the theatrical equivalent of comfort food. Tasty and filling, the all-singing, all-dancing extravaganzas of the mid-20th century are pleasures, to be sure, but also perpetual sources of undernourishment for the serious theatergoer.
The fragility of our assumptions
becomes achingly clear in HPU's
musical adaptation of the Irish
writer's haunting novellaBy Scott Vogel
svogel@starbulletin.comNot so "James Joyce's 'The Dead,'" surely the soberest text ever to find itself magically transported to Rodgers and Hammerstein Land. Based on a haunting 50-page novella (the last 10 pages are as heartbreaking as any in the English language), "The Dead" concerns the 1904 installment of the elderly Morkan sisters' annual Christmas party. The Morkans are truly a singing family (the sisters, along with their live-in niece, are all music teachers), and the yearly event is a chance for both family members and music students to partake of two favorite Irish pastimes, performing and drinking.
The story's heavy reliance on music eases the transition from page to stage, but there are other pitfalls awaiting potential adapters, most notably the tale's penetrating interiority. The main figure in "The Dead" is the Morkans' nephew Gabriel Conroy, a stuffy, middle-aged pedant who begins the evening by obsessing over a speech he plans to deliver. By night's end, however, he has come to question the basic facts of his life, many of which he had accepted a priori. There is the question, for example, of his wife Gretta's past life, in particular a long forgotten teenage romance that she suddenly recalls after hearing a tune that the boy, Michael Furey, used to sing to her.That budding relationship and its ultimate doom are recalled in "Michael Furey," a beautiful hymn by the Irish songwriter Shaun Davey who, along with playwright Richard Nelson, adapted Joyce's text for a successful run at New York's Playwrights Horizons theater, a production notable not only for its subsequent transfer to Broadway's Belasco Theater but also a singing (yes, singing) Christopher Walken in the role of Gabriel.
"Usually a play hinges on a very large kind of melodramatic moment," said Alan Sutterfield, who stars as Gabriel in the Hawaii Pacific University production directed by Joyce (Maltby, that is), opening tonight at the Windward Campus theater. "I can appreciate the fact that both the short story and the play hinge on something that's really -- in the grand scheme of things -- pretty minor. Sooo, she was in love with a boy when she was a teenager 25 years ago!"
When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, beginning tonight; 4 p.m. Sunday; 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays through Dec. 9 "James Joyce's 'The Dead' "
Where: Hawaii Pacific University Theater, Windward Campus, 45-045 Kamehameha Hwy.
Cost: $14 general; $10 for seniors, military and students; $5 HPU students
Call: 375-1282
This being James Joyce, however, everything turns on the seemingly small.
"The arc of the evening is supposed to culminate in this wonderful night at a hotel," said Sutterfield's onstage wife, Eden-Lee Murray. "The kids are at home. It's going to be great. But then something happens to change everything." And when that something happens, a marriage's underlying fragility is thrown into devastating relief.
"It's not even so much that it happened," added Sutterfield. "It's just that she didn't share it with me, and I think that's what hurts me. He thought he had known her so well and yet here's something really important that she had hidden from him all these years."
In a more literate world, "The Dead" would be required reading for couples seeking marriage, which is exactly what Sutterfield himself plans to do on the final Saturday of the show's run. "My fiancee, who'll then be my wife, will see it closing night," he revealed, seemingly unspooked by the musical's content matter. "It's a very romantic play and for me it's a very romantic time."
Still, the actor (or anyone in the audience, for that matter) could be forgiven if he harbored the tiniest of suspicions about his intended. After all, it's his Gabriel who encourages us, however unintentionally, to be on our guard.
"The world, I've come to think, is like the surface of a frozen lake," he says as the play begins. "You walk along. You slip. We try to keep our balance and not to fall. One day a crack appears. And so we learn that just beneath us lies an unimaginable depth."
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